Homestead Cheese Culture - General Purpose Mesophilic - Freeze Dried Sachet

I use this cheese culture to make some starter for fresh cheese (quark) and it worked out well. I made the starter according to the directions on the packet and pored it into mini muffin tins and then froze them solid. I then bagged the individual starter cubes and put them in my freezer and and now I use two cubes to to pints milk to make cheese. Works a treat. The only suggestion is that the cheese recipe they give doesn't have any salt in it and I put in a bit of salt for flavour.

Lively mix of cultures - added to a litre of cooled, boiled milk, thoroughly whisked in and quickly potted up into 20 x 50ml sterilised pots, labelled and frozen, this sachet makes enough mother culture for 20 cheesemaking sessions. I've found 50ml of starter is enough to inoculate two gallons of milk at a time - it'd probably do more, but I only make cheese for the house. This makes good, well flavoured cheeses - whether they're simple soft curd cheeses or pressed. I'll buy this blend again. I bought this back at the beginning of June '17 and it had a BB date of November 2018, a good, long shelf life. If I'd frozen the unopened sachet, it would have had a further 6 months, but I did start it off pretty much straight away. It's a good, lively starter.

Following the freezing method that came with the product, I used plastic cubes to freeze them. My son thinks they are ice cream cubes

This was easy to use and produced the expected results in the time given on the instruction. I have since made 3 cheddars from the same batch, and froze various portions of it for future use. Very affordable, too!

As stated sort worked but did not end up with a liquid not good enough to strain very thin

The enclosed Homestead instructions were limited but Maggie's advice on this site of how to make 20 starters pots from just one sachet that could then be frozen was a great help. I am new to cheesemaking and only started when I was gifted a Mad Millie cheesemaking kit. The Mad Millie mesohphilic sachets are currently selling at £1.50 (£7.50 per pack of 5) each so the Homestead comes out so much cheaper. The only issue I have had is that with just 50 ml of the prepared culture my feta was too soft but when repeated with two lots of the 50 ml culture is the best feta I have made yet.

Used this according to the instructions using fresh (pasteurised) milk but after the recommended period and temperature all that had happened was that the milk had gone off. Shame because I had hoped to make a big batch of starter cultures for future use.

Item as shown on screen, to specification, received on time and in full